Everything you need to know about Digital Marketing – Talk Marketing 002 – Jeremy Spiller

Talk Marketing 002 – Jeremy Spiller

Martin: Good afternoon Mr Spiller.

Good afternoon Mr Henley.

Martin: How are you? You are looking resplendent.

It’s very nice of you to say that, but that’s your words not mine – after eight months of this nonsense.

Martin: Whatever’s going on with your hair man. When I went into Singapore one time the immigration guy said to me, when I had long curly hair, the immigration said to me the ladies will be jealous and I feel like a lot of people are going to be jealous of what’s going on on your head.

I call it lockdown fever, I’m sure there are many out there in the same state doing my best.

Martin: But not with the same quality, that is interesting.

Move on from there, okay thank you for the compliments they’re always welcome.

Martin: Only a pleasure. So the reason we’re speaking this afternoon is because I think    you know quite a lot, specifically about digital marketing, so I’m  kind of interested to talk to you about your digital marketing experience and how digital marketing has evolved and where you think it’s going, how people should be thinking about digital marketing in the future.

Before we start all of that, why on earth should anyone bother listening to you when it comes to digital marketing? What actually have you been up to in digital marketing?

Well they shouldn’t, so I’ll just be off. No just kidding, okay just kidding. I suppose because I’ve  been doing digital marketing for a long time. As  I started, I was actually on the internet before there was a web, this was around 92. I worked for a company called Ashmount Research which was an internet software company, pre-web, and we thought we were very special because, I can’t remember exactly, but there were only ten or twenty thousand people online in the UK and it was good times. Then, two or three years later after I started with Ashmount the web turned up. People already did stuff on the web, there were things like Kiks and Compuserve, if you were around then you probably wouldn’t remember, but then the web turned up and I just thought wow this is amazing. I launched an agency, did great things, went right through the dot-com boom, then in the early 2000s launched another agency. The first agency was more about web building, although I think we were doing a sort of digital marketing without knowing we were doing it. We were doing things like email, we were doing things like user experience but things like social media marketing and stuff were mostly in the future.   

Then there was another agency in the early 2000s and that was very much about digital marketing.  At about the same time maybe two or three years after launching that second agency I started getting invited to speak and teach and all those sorts of things so did those things in parallel. Anyway cut a long story short, I had some fantastic clients some great clients,  people like Microsoft, Toshiba; I’ve  worked with people like IBM, The  Royal Opera House, lots and lots of, big names and lots of startups and small names too. Working on multiple campaigns internationally and then as I mentioned teaching all this stuff, it’s taken me all over the world, I’ve  met some fantastic people had some fantastic experiences and I’m  still doing so. Except for the fact that obviously, Covid has slowed things down so the face-to-face has stopped, but still doing a lot of virtual stuff and now working with universities, business schools and training organisations as well as keeping my hand in, because I still I think that, even though you teach and train you should still be being able to do stuff, run campaigns, manage things.

Martin: Yeah you absolutely should be able to do stuff. To paraphrase, just in case people don’t understand quite what your experience is you were working in the internet in 92 before any of us had, or there were only 20,000 internet users in the UK, I only came along in 95. You started your first agency, you started your second agency in the early 2000s – I think that’s when you and I came across each other, and you have been teaching and lecturing for coming up to 15 years. So I know you as a very successful and popular lecturer with the Digital Marketing Institute. I know that’s taken you to four continents, you’ve done huge amounts of work with e-Consultancy, that’s taken you to however many continents. I know that you have taught for Google – so it seems like the world thinks you know something about digital marketing Jem.

Yeah, well Google, to be fair, Google through a company called Avado.  I also work for a company called ISTI which is in Spain. Avado do global stuff with Google and others as well; people like ICE Malta, and there’s the CIIIM in Cyprus and lot and lots of other digital marketing training organisations. Also some universities people like Cult, Rutgers and  EDHEC as well in northern France. So that’s my digital marketing experience – I mean, it’s probably more teaching and training than actually doing at the moment, but I’m  always open for offers.

Martin: Well you’ve been on it for 28 years so you are allowed to step away a little now.

Especially now, obviously things are very different than they were a year ago or 10 months ago even.

Martin: Absolutely.

I’ve  done a lot of different things running a lot of different campaigns, literally hundreds if not thousands of websites and hundreds, certainly hundreds, of marketing campaigns in multiple countries and multiple disciplines as well. So yeah it’s been fun that’s the thing, I mean, I love it, it’s great yes.

Martin: I think we get it Jem we think you know  quite a bit about digital marketing, I think we’ve made that point, that’s cool.

So what interests me about you is the fact that you have, probably, a unique perspective on how the whole digital marketing industry has evolved, you were involved before it was even a thing, let alone an industry. I talk to people about digital marketing,    I’ve  been out of the game five six years. I’ve come now to look at my website and we were a marketing and digital marketing agency but it was known then as web marketing or internet marketing but not digital marketing because that wasn’t a thing at that time. Digital marketing only came around in about 2012 but at that stage you’d already been in the game for 20 years. So that’s what I’m  interested to find out more about is how digital marketing  has evolved and maybe later in the conversation we can go on to how you think digital marketing is going to evolve next.

I think it’s a bit like modern pop or rock, whatever you want to call it, contemporary music.    The Beatles are said to have kicked it off in the 60s and it then extended into all sorts of different areas and so on and so forth. There are new trends, new styles, new ways of doing things – so it evolves. It’s not that there wasn’t music beforehand and actually, interestingly, it’s not that there wasn’t networking before the internet, it’s just that that’s the the way things have evolved.

It started off with networks when Tim Berners-Lee created the protocols for the web in Cerne, Switzerland. The idea was that they were working on the Hadron Collider thing and they needed a way of linking documents, they wanted to create a method where you could go from a link in one document to another document. Hence they created hypertext and that that from that there was hypertext markup language, hence html. There were a number of other similar systems being developed at the same time but it was all about connections, that was the first thing. Interestingly, even Berners-Lee says that back then it was about linking documents and then it evolved to link businesses, link people. What Berners-Lee is now talking about, has been talking about for a few years, is the linking of data. It’s that sort of evolution that has underpinned digital marketing,  about connections and linking and that’s progressed over the last 20 or 30 years. More and more techniques have developed. We started off, I think, with email. I think the first time I heard about email marketing it was maybe 95-96, there was a bunch of lawyers in the states who did email blasts, spam, in the US and that kicked off the whole email marketing thing. Of course, when Facebook and others launched in the early 2000s that kicked off the whole social media thing.

I think right now we’re very much in the world of data, it’s all about data, data is now the currency of the internet, as the larger players know very well, the Facebooks and the Googles, data is vital to digital marketing and that should be something that smaller businesses need to be aware of; to look after their data. That’s why data is so contentious. We’re now in a world of data, that’s where we’re at at the moment and that’s what’s going to happen more so in the future.

Martin: Okay so to go back then, you say your first agency, that you started around 95, you called that web building, so that was about building websites is that right?

I mean this is another thing I have an issue with, because people talk about web designers and there’s really no such thing as a web designer per se. If you want someone to design your website typically you’ll be talking about the graphic design, the look and feel. When businesses make a decision as to who they’re going to use to build a website they often pick the best designers but actually there’s other skills needed to create really great websites. Obviously, being able to write html, nowadays most of that’s done by systems like Drupal and WordPress and things like that but there are different roles in terms of building sites. Back then, in the mid 90s or mid to late 90s it was much, much more straightforward. You tended to have smaller groups of people creating websites, smaller agencies, and because there wasn’t much competition around a small agency of say eight or ten people could win huge clients, and did. A lot of those agencies are still around today except they are now multinationals. But yes, it was mostly about building effective websites and then very shortly after that email came along and then much later on it was social, search engine optimisation and all of the things that we know today as digital marketing.

Martin: What’s interesting is that it’s not very different from my experience. I don’t know if you know but we started, when I met you probably back in 2005 or 2006, we started as a sales consultancy and telemarketing agency. What happened is that we then integrated that with email marketing, so it seems that email marketing is always at the front of these things. We then evolved into a digital marketing agency where we would put together websites and SEO campaigns, and email campaigns, and social campaigns and all of those things.

That’s The Effective Marketing Company.

Martin: Yeah, that’s The Effective Marketing Company.

So does it evolve, that’s the thing I’ve been thinking about in having this conversation, I’ve  been thinking actually how much evolution has gone on, but we’ll come to that in a second.

What’s interesting to me is that digital marketing does evolve. When I teach for example I stay a million miles away from the functionality,  where that button is and where that button is and if you want to do precisely that function then you have to go through this process. I try and stay on the principles of marketing. It seems to me that there’s lots of people who will call themselves digital marketers, who know where all the buttons are but they didn’t necessarily know anything about marketing before that. Does that make sense?

Absolutely, makes perfect sense and on that particular point I entirely agree with you. There’s what I call over the shoulder training, which is where you literally, you literally are showing someone how to set up Google Analytics or showing someone how to set up a Facebook campaign, or manage a Facebook campaign.

One of the big problems with all of that is that the interfaces are in a state of constant flux, so you you might say … want to find Keyword Planner, you go here and you click on this button and then you go there and here you’ll find keyword planner. Next week it’s all changed, that’s the big challenge. I don’t want to take anything away from the doers because I have known lots of, and have worked with lots of great people who do that type of work and I’ve  done it myself. Every single one of those roles, setting up Analytics, setting up campaigns, I’ve  done. There’s a big difference between that and then understanding things like customer centric or data driven marketing or behavioural user experience. There are some really key things that underpin successful digital marketing and

Martin: I think that goes back to ….

Jeremy: Now there’s this big thing with transformation.

Yes, sorry, carry on.

I think this goes back to what you were saying before, in 95 if you were a website building agency there might be eight of you and you could be hugely successful.

Martin: That’s one of the things that’s gone, where so many more people are now involved. It’s become so much more compartmentalised so you can be employed as somebody who just sets up Google Ads, you can be a Google Ad specialist, or you could be a Facebook marketing specialist or a or a Twitter marketing specialist. In that sense I think it’s become much, much more fragmented, although I don’t think necessarily much more technical. I don’t have anything against those people who do that work but what I don’t particularly enjoy is people who just work out where the buttons are and then call themselves a digital marketer. When I run a course the first thing I do is I ask is who here has worked in traditional marketing three or four hands go up, who’s working in digital marketing maybe no hands go up, or some hands will go up, and I’m like who’s done both? Then I say to them, the traditional marketers – you are much better off knowing something about marketing and nothing about digital marketing, knowing a lot about marketing and nothing about digital marketing. Does that make sense?

Yeah I mean I do wonder nowadays. There’s a couple of points I want to make on that. The first point I want to make is the danger of, as you say, push button marketing and the scamming that goes on. You, probably, like me get these pre-roll ads on Youtube or you see them on Facebook where someone tells you you can do a million dollars in a month or something like that. Someone says look at my fast car that he probably rented for the day or all this nonsense and typically they’re focusing on one method of digital marketing, it’s often Facebook advertising, it might be drop shipping on Amazon. It’s actually stuff that you can learn pretty easily, pretty quickly yourself, just by going on the courses, many of which are completely free. I’m talking about the how to stuff, or you can watch a few Youtube videos.

These guys, and I say guys, I mean people, are pretending it’s some type of magic sauce and it’s mostly based on nonsense anyway. Because they don’t tell you how much their spend on the budget was and it really irritates the heck out of me that there are these people  now, there’s a lot, the internet is full of a lot of scammery and spoofery and that really irritates. People are doing bad things and exploiting people’s lack of knowledge, it really annoys me.

Yes, on that point, on that second point you made about digital marketing and marketing I’m  not sure there is a difference, I think there is marketing and actually digital marketing or internet, or online, or whatever you want to call it happens to be a part of that because they are so interwoven now. Even marketing, the very nature of marketing per se is so interwoven into what businesses do.

We obviously, naturally, like to label things because then we can understand them more easily, more simply, but it’s it’s much more complex than that.  It’s been more and more so now in current times because so much now is going online, people are realising oh I can do that online, I can do this online, I can do all these other things I didn’t know I could. I didn’t know I could run a whole office and have everybody in the office now working from home online.  I mean, this is changing as we speak, it’s changing as we speak so I think I don’t know if we’re talking across purposes? ****

For me it’s marketing and then you apply that in a digital fashion, so if you don’t know about marketing you really can’t know about digital marketing. It’s kind of like you have to ride a bike with stabilisers before you ride a bike without stabilisers, although maybe some people managed to ride a bike without stabilisers.

I think there are some important concepts that sit underneath both. If the two are separate and, as I said, I’m not sure they are …

I don’t think they’re separate. I think the big thing is marketing and then digital marketing is a big part of that now.

And the only thing I would go as far to say, and this is something I know for example Google believes in, which I happen to agree with a lot is, that it’s digital first. A lot of people think okay this marketing thing, we’ll build a website, oh and we’ll get a social media profile up and running, oh and we’ll do some email marketing. I think that’s actually the wrong way around, I think when you’re, especially when you’re a startup, you should think okay most of my customers are going to be online, customers are going to be online so we should be thinking what are we going to do online first. It goes beyond that because actually most of my customers aren’t just going to be online, they’re going to be using smartphones and mobile devices so actually it’s digital first, mobile first. I really do think that, I think that the statistics, the numbers, you only need to look at analytics to see how most people are reaching your website and it will be through mobile devices nowadays. People don’t think that you start a business, and they think okay we’ll start the business, oh we need a website, oh we need this, it’s the wrong way around, it’s really the wrong way around. People should be thinking what can I do digitally first that’s an important difference.

Okay, we are disagreeing, we did say we weren’t going to disagree before we started but we are disagreeing.

Before you do anything digitally you have to do some market research, you have to do some marketing. For example you have to decide what products you’re going to sell, how you’re going to price them, where you’re going to position them.

That’s not marketing.

Targeting all of that stuff that.

It could be, well again totally, I mean, I’m totally, well that is marketing in a sense, so I delete that, I mean don’t don’t actually delete it but yeah of course that’s marketing. These are things that underpin your business. Right, so yes, no I I hear what you’re saying. There is a process so you need for example, you need a brand and a brand is very much part of the marketing mix, so you need to be thinking about your brand and your products and so on and so forth, yes. But now we’re into a different conversation now we’re into the conversation of the process of marketing.

Now you’ve joined the conversation that I was always having. So the thing is for me business is marketing, businesses is sales and marketing, that’s what it is. Now if Google are saying, but they have a vested interest obviously in saying that you need to do digital marketing first, that’s absolutely fine. If they’re saying before you put up billboards, before you start writing press releases for the newspapers, before you advertise on TV then absolutely it makes sense to do digital.

Now you’re talking process, you’re talking process, now the the word I said is think digital first. Okay so when you think about what you’re going to do, you start on the basis that actually you’re going to be doing digital marketing. So when you think about your brand for example, yes of course you have to define your brand through brand positioning and who your audience are and so on, with the thought that when you do things you’re actually going to be doing them digitally. If you don’t, literally, obviously before you build a website you need to know what you’re selling, who your audience are and all those sorts of things which technically speaking as you say are not digital but you should be thinking that you’re going, your plan should be, or your intention should be, to put digital first because that’s where you’re going to get the best return.

That’s fine if they’re saying that digital marketing initiatives are well, I’m  a huge exponent of digital marketing, it is much more cost effective, it’s much more knowable, it’s much more efficient – like you say  huge markets are online and that’s absolutely fine. I think I’m  right.

I don’t know which bit you want to be right about.

For me, and I’m  sure you would agree with this, you can’t do digital marketing if you can’t do marketing.

Let’s put it this way, you can do digital marketing without knowing anything about marketing; it will cost you a lot of money and you won’t achieve much – that is what I would say.

In essence, to be, what I think you’re saying, just so I can slightly rephrase it but you’re right, you can’t be a good digital marketer without understanding the key elements and concepts behind good marketing. Absolutely spot on yeah, you can do it, you can do it badly. I mean heck, we both know loads of businesses that have done it badly and do do it badly, so you can do it, but you you’ll do it very badly or badly unless you understand the basic marketing concepts. Like knowing your audience, understanding who your customers are, knowing how to reach them et cetera et cetera. These things apply and that’s the bit I like because we’re not at the moment talking about real world marketing or bricks and mortar marketing but I think those  concepts also have a very big role to play of course they do yeah. You have to do that basic marketing work, that’s what I would do. Absolutely, I 150% agree with you.

I don’t know if you saw the interview that I did with Ed but we were talking about some clown and he’s running these pre-roll ads on Youtube and his whole pitch is “did you know that companies would be willing to pay you between a thousand dollars and two thousand dollars a month to do their marketing and did you know that you don’t even need to know how to do marketing.” That is the mess that marketing has got itself into, because clients are seeing that. Do you know what I mean? So what they are thinking is “yeah we’re just going to throw a grand or two grand a month at somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing.” I think marketing has got itself in an entire mess.

I don’t think marketing has got itself into an entire mess, I think people have got marketing into an entire mess. We talked about history and stuff. I remember the first websites and even today, the quality of a lot of websites leaves a lot to be desired. For example, user testing – how many people run  user experience tests to actually test their websites? To make their websites better, and there’s an enormous value to doing that, but businesses aren’t. They’re launching websites without testing them properly, just for basic usability. A lot of stuff happens. I think the reason that that both marketing and digital marketing sometimes, are as you say, in a mess, is not because per se they are meant to be that way it’s just that people, interestingly, need to know how to do stuff properly. That’s, I guess, where we come in, hopefully, hopefully, do you think?

I do think, and I do think that marketing has got itself in a mess and I do think it’s largely marketing people’s fault, but I don’t think it necessarily matters.

I remember when I got involved with you, I think you were my third or fourth client back in 2005 and you were drowning in leads. You were ranking in first position for SEO Services and you had 30 jokers a day calling you up wanting you to get them to the top of Google for no money and you didn’t know what to do with these leads so you engaged us to talk to those people, that’s that’s how I remember it. But SEO at that time was largely about link building, so SEO has evolved – like you say it’s mobile first now. At that time it was about links and then it became about the quality of the content, and then it became about high quality links and and all of those things. So how do you feel about that particular evolution, where do you see SEO now?

I think SEO is as important as it’s ever been. The interesting thing about SEO is again, back then things were a little more compartmentalised. People were still on this concept of I’ve  got a business, I need a website, I need to do email marketing oh and I’ll do some SEO. It was that sort of progressive type of thinking. The way thinking progressed at the time, people were bolting on extra things they needed to help their sales grow online. I think the interesting thing now is, not wishing to be playing BS bingo, I think the big thing now is the integration of the various channels. We talk about omni channel marketing and that’s very difficult if you’re a tiny business or a startup because, I work with tiny businesses and startups and entrepreneurs and they say I’ve  got to learn all this stuff or I’ve  got to have a ton of cash to outsource it, and I’ve  got to do all these things and that’s really quite a challenge if you haven’t got resources. If you’ve got to be thinking about omni channel marketing, which is everything integrating together, that’s a big ask when you’ve got a small startup with limited resources and a big challenge. Having said that, I think that small businesses can do great things if they focus on the right things.

Yeah, I think they absolutely can, but this comes back to what I was saying before about it all becoming so compartmentalised. When we were a telemarketing agency, people would come to us and they’re like “we need some help with our marketing” and it’s like okay, the answer is telemarketing. Of course it is, because if you’re selling hammers every problem has to be a nail, do you know what I mean? So, absolutely, we got into, we didn’t call it omni channel marketing, we called it integrated marketing. You do your marketing work, you set your messages, you do your targeting, you identify where the people are and then you tailor those messages for each of the platforms. I think the danger of digital marketing becoming so compartmentalised is that if you are a specialist Facebook marketing company, well I think it needs to integrate apart from anything, but if I go to a specialist Facebook advertising company they’re going to tell me you need Facebook advertising, if I go to a specialist Google Ads company, or a specialist SEO company then they’re going to tell me I need Google Ads or SEO. What do I think? I think that actually you need integrated marketing, you need to be able to work across those platforms and I don’t know how many agencies there are that are available to do that, well maybe there’s lots of very small businesses who kind of understand the whole thing, very few well.

I say that the so-called full service agencies is what you’re talking about and it’s what most agencies, no that’s not true, it’s what many agencies aspire to be. They want to own their client, they want to do all the work they can for their clients so they propose everything.

Yeah, yeah, but the truth of the matter is actually it’s really difficult to be a full service agency because you’ve got to have skill sets in all those different disciplines. Of course nowadays one of the biggest and growing areas, while you were talking, I was thinking is influencer marketing which is now huge. There’s been a massive growth in the last few years of agencies that’s completely specialise in providing data or providing networks of influencers to brands, and these things are evolving all the time.

If you want to compete you’ve got to be on it, in the right things, and I think it’s really challenging for businesses now because there are so many options. Businesses have got a certain budget, beyond which they can’t go, and people need to know how to make the right decisions, let alone make the right decisions that actually work, they need to know what parameters apply to what. What channels I should be using and how are those channels going to integrate together, how do I measure them all and how do I work out which ones are actually resulting in a decent return on spend, or return on investment. That’s all makes everything much more complicated and I have to be fair because I have slightly dissed people in marketing, but I do also think there are some amazing talents out there and you and I have both worked with people with huge talent and still do work with people with massive talent. The people who tend to be more talented are people who have a passion for it as well, it’s more than just a job, it’s a passion, it’s a, I hesitate to say, lifestyle. They are really into it, they love doing it, they are very good at doing it and they’re passionate about making it work. Those sorts of people, and I’ve  met lots of them, fortunately, been lucky to meet lots of them are absolutely gold dust    and there are people out there who are really like that.

I think ’s true. I feel that, with my what the series, that I did my time in the trenches and now I’m out of the trenches this is like my Platoon, like Oliver Stone’s Platoon you, know he was there, he saw it, he did the fight and then he kind of made his statements about it afterwards.

I do think there are big challenges in marketing and digital marketing and I think there are barriers to agencies being successful and businesses and clients being successful, there are barriers. But I think we kind of covered that  with Ed’s thing. I just think, from my marketing principles standpoint, for me it isn’t so complicated, it doesn’t need to be so complicated. If a full service agency is working on the basis that they want to do absolutely all the marketing that it’s possible to do then then that’s a different proposition from mine. For example, if a business to business client comes to me then I will know I’m  going to look at Google Ads, I’m  going to look at SEO, I’m  going to look at LinkedIn, I’m  going to look at Email Marketing – these are going to be the four places where we’ll start because that’s what works in b2b businesses. Then, maybe we can start looking at other platforms once we’ve got those four integrated. I think that working up approach is probably much better than saying we’ll be your agency but you can expect us to do everything and we’re going to want to do everything. I think it’s interesting, so for example if I’m  a client and I go to a Facebook advertising specialist agency I need to know for absolute certainty that Facebook Ads is the right place for me to be putting my budget. If I’m  a small business how could I possibly know that?

You were talking about full service and how it isn’t that complicated because you’ve got a defined set of activities your foundation activities, which, by the way, I completely agree with.  You’re talking about the core functionality that you offer to your clients.

As an agency I’ve worked with, lord knows, a thousand different businesses, surely the benefit of using an agency is that they have some sense of what’s going to be effective for them. What I am saying is if it’s b2b then I’ll go to Google Ads, SEO, LinkedIn and Email – those are the things that typically work for b2b clients, once those things are happening and integrated then I would hope, at that point, to be able to show a return and if I make a recommendation it’ll be based on the fact that I’m  delivering a return for them already.

So I don’t think marketing needs to be complicated, but the narrative is that it is complicated and I think that’s part of the issue. What I tell people is that marketing is absolutely 100% necessary. You don’t you don’t need to learn the whole of digital marketing but you do need to understand the principles of marketing to be in a position to outsource it. Clients have to know enough about marketing to be in a position to outsource it to somebody, because if you outsource marketing without knowing enough then you will get fleeced.

I think yeah, I don’t disagree with that. There’s no question that if you look at the different marketing channels some are more important than others for particular businesses, depending on the business that you’re talking to, absolutely. I mean that in itself requires know-how, to keep up to date with the trends of what works and what doesn’t work so that is an expertise that you can offer to your clients. There’s lots of organisations out there doing lots of research into which channels you get a better return on spend, or are more worth using.

Yes depending on where they’re coming from. The thing is it’s becoming more technical and it is becoming more specialist. This is what I was thinking when I was thinking I want to talk to Jem about the evolution of digital marketing. Facebook was 16 years old this week for me there was a period, they might have started in 2004 we all got excited and started offering services around 2007 or 2008    but Social Media marketing has already been around for 12 or 13 years. In behind that Twitter and then in behind that came YouTube, but there hasn’t been a step change in the evolution of Digital Marketing since.

Well there’s a lot of 16 year olds, a lot of 17 or 18 year olds that wouldn’t touch Facebook now because their parents are on it. In fact the fastest growing demographic, this was a few years ago admittedly, three or four years ago the fastest demographic with regards to growth in the US was 55 year old women, this is Facebook. So you have to ask, if you want to reach a certain demographic, should you be using, I don’t know Tick Tock or something   to reach that demographic. That’s where you get, not only industry change, but you get a change in trends as well, you need to know what’s working. Facebook have been fighting very hard to maintain their relevance in the marketplace.

I’m  not sure, I don’t know, I’ve  seen it recently, I’m  not sure what what the numbers are with regards to 18 to 22 year olds for example, but with Facebook I know certainly, a lot of my friends, I’m not 18 to 22, but they don’t use it.

Think about the people  who use Facebook, I guess it may be people with a demographic not dissimilar to yours.

That’s another way things are evolving, influencer marketing. I think one of the reasons that’s happening is because the trend now, and has been for some time, is so much about celebrity. There has been this massive growth in various reality TV shows there’s a lot about celebrity, celebrities who really are famous for doing very little now have huge influence and that’s fine as long as brands understand that, influencer marketing is fantastically successful and it’s a growth area. It’s being aware of things like that, that is important and as I say in my opinion is one of the biggest growth areas, has been for some time. It’s all part of the whole, what is also called, digital transformation because that itself has been a trend the last few years even though that’s going a little bit off the boil.

Now its  data and the use of data to target people more accurately. Another trend which Google is heavily investing in and which is all the rage at the moment is AI and machine learning. I heard the other day that Google have three and a half thousand projects going on in machine learning, and automation, and artificial intelligence, so there’s all that as well. That’s all coming on stream as we speak. Of course we could talk about the internet of things for the rest of this session if we wanted to, because that’s another huge growth area and businesses being businesses and wanting to be leaders and market leaders they want to know about that they want to say.

Okay, so I I get that. People are using these different devices and are logging onto the web from their car and their fridges and and who knows what, but how do we use it as a business and that’s the bit that particularly interests me because I find that that area fascinating. The future is fascinating.

Martin: So this comes back to your question, I don’t know anyone who uses Facebook anymore. I don’t use Facebook anymore. There was a time if I was training and on a break I would scroll through and it would keep me busy for that 15 minutes or for that hour if it was lunch time. Now I don’t, I literally, I probably – I know I get notifications every day on my phone saying it’s somebody’s birthday, I wish everybody a happy birthday because I think that’s a really nice thing to do, and then I don’t look at it. I’ve  been trying to get hold of someone for two weeks, today he got the message, I only had his Facebook he’s like yeah I’m  not here, try me on Instagram or try me somewhere else. All these trends happen, everyone’s getting off Facebook, kids don’t want to be on Facebook because their mum’s on Facebook, and then all of a sudden they do want to be on Facebook because they’re mum’s now on Snapchat or whatever. I think marketing is guilty of scaring people, the fear of missing out, if you don’t do this new thing, Snapchat, or TikTok or whatever it was before, then you’re gonna miss out. But in terms of actual step change innovations, social media happened between 2004 and 2008 and for me there hasn’t been a step change since then.

I think part of the challenge comes back to what I was disagreeing with you about before, that you didn’t realise I was disagreeing with you about, I don’t doubt at all that Google are saying digital first, but for me it should be people first or it should be market first because that’s what underpins all of marketing. At the end of the day it is a person putting their bank details into the payment gateway.

Jeremy: I agree with you.

Martin: I think there’s a real danger that the big internet players, because they’re geeks, and I think the bible needs to amend that line, it needs to be rewritten because it is the geeks that  have have inherited the world, it was never going to be the meak, it was always going to be the geeks. I think the geeks have inherited the earth but I don’t think they’re in touch enough with people to sustain that momentum that they had between 2012 and 2015.

Jeremy: Okay, to your point, I think that digital first is sort of become almost synonymous with people first anyway. This concept that Jeff Bezos calls customer centricity. Customer centricity is about understanding the customers wants, needs, and indeed understanding the customer themselves. The demographic, their behaviour, their attitudes and so on. This is an interesting one because I absolutely agree with you, I think it is all about putting people first and when I said it’s synonymous I think it’s digital that delivers the ability to be able to put customers first. You need to learn about your customers as Amazon have demonstrated, you use data and that’s why, that really is why, it comes back to data. The reason these companies and the big players are investing huge amounts of money into harvesting, managing, and reading, and using our data is because they are making a profit out of it, because that’s what they want to do. That’s something, because, most people watching this are probably not going to be from huge enterprises like that, many people may have their own businesses. Certainly in terms of numbers there are many more smaller businesses than larger businesses of course, and a lot of people wonder well why is that relevant to me? I’ve  got a small business selling hammers, I think a good example you gave, why is all this relevant to me. Well I think it is relevant to small businesses to understand that if they learn more about their customers by gathering data legally, they will be better at selling their customers stuff. That comes back to your point, which is understanding customers is definitely about good marketing.

Yeah and whether it’s online or offline that’s all marketing ever was. Jeff Bezos might be coming to customer centric marketing now, but for me it was only ever customer focused and where they got it wrong, I don’t want to argue with you about this, you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, where they got it wrong is they do have lots of data on their customers, they have arguably too much data, but they don’t know their customers well enough to know that people aren’t going to enjoy these businesses, these corporations, having that much information on them. That is part of the backlash, not for Amazon necessarily, because people are going to hold my books, but for your Facebook’s and your Googles, and your Twitters. I remember signing up for Twitter, I think it was 2007 or 2006 and I thought, they seem like a nice bunch of guys out of northeast America what could possibly go wrong. Of course, 20 minutes later they sold themselves to Wall Street and everyone knows what’s gone on since then.

Now there is a very real skepticism and when people talk about artificial intelligence that absolutely scares the shit out of me because, at different times of my career I’ve  worked with developers who write computer programs and I don’t want those people to be in charge of the world with their iffy code. Which is what I think is going on, so hearing that Google’s got three and a half thousand AI projects certainly doesn’t impress me, it actually scares the shit out of me. I think we’re getting to that stage, I think that digital marketing is gonna become more challenging because people are going to be more resistant. My friend has a little two-year-old boy, we live here in Indonesia and he already, when he starts playing a video on Youtube, and he doesn’t speak yet but he already knows, he’s got his finger on the skip add button and he’s pushing it, and pushing it, and pushing it so that after five seconds he’s definitely not seeing any more of that advert. I think that’s probably a challenge for digital marketing go forward, that people are skeptical and unhappy with the way some of these platforms behave.

Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned there was this recent Senate hearing where they grilled four tech leaders quite heavily, it went on for six hours on Youtube it’s definitely worth watching, it’s on the CNN channel. It’s absolutely fascinating because the Senators who appear to have very little understanding of the web, but they lay at the feet of these four tech leaders these CEO’s and people from Google and so on. They lay at their feet all these issues and you’re absolutely right, I think there is a huge distrust now by people of the fact that large entities have their data and for all intent and purposes don’t really know what they’re doing with it. ****

They don’t know the the full extent of what they’re doing with it, the amount of apps for example that track where we are on our smartphones. They get told you’ve got 12 apps that are tracking you, but the average person in the street has no idea how to even stop that happening. So yeah, there is definitely there is a huge amount of skepticism and that as you also correctly say results in a huge amount of caution. Which is possibly why we had GDPR introduced in Europe because, of course, governments decided to collaborate and set some standards. Now whether businesses are actually all adhering to those will remain to be seen when the court cases start but yeah, there’s definitely skepticism. They’re also right in saying that makes it much more difficult for people who just innocently want to provide best better customer experiences and collecting data to do so. Without a doubt and that that’s a trend in itself by the way, and that’s going to get more so as we move forward.

Talking of the future that use of data, that concern about how our data is being used, because what’s happening, as we expand into a world of more devices, there are more ways that people can collect our data. One area for example is in healthcare, nowadays, certainly in the UK, all your health information now goes on to a central a database that the medical profession uses so they can say see what you’ve been prescribed, what illnesses you’ve come in with, when you’ve had trips to hospital – that’s data that insurance companies would love to get their hands on.

Absolutely, and the and the way you’re driving in your car that’s right, yup yup you’ve got apps sending your heart rate and your blood pressure all day every day. Coming back to my original talk about Tim Berners-Lee this is a massive worry he has had, because I mentioned that now he’s talking about the growth and the linking of data. Remember where it started – the linking of documents, the linking of people, now the linking of data   which Berners-Lee himself is massively worried about. This data issue, the fact that it’s out there and it’s being used, and of course misused, in all sorts of ways.  We’re facing a, well  we’re not facing it, but in the US they’ve got an election now, I know this might not be timely, but right now there’s an election in a month’s time. What’s going on, even though they’re trying to stop it, is the interference of foreign governments meddling in their election, maybe perfectly reasonable but these governments are using data to identify who to try and influence and then you’ve got the social media companies like Twitter and Facebook trying to stop this data being manipulated by foreign governments.

At the same time, it’s challenging, but I also think it’s hugely overblown. What was the Facebook documentary with Cambridge Analytics? Whatever it was called ….

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Jeremy: I know the one yeah, that was all very sensationalised. I think the media sensationalise things because that’s what they do, because they want to sell more subscriptions, I mean it would be sell newspapers, but it’s not anymore, it’s selling subscriptions to websites. The media will always gravitate, I mean everything the media does, and I say this with great respect, because I do understand they have to sell papers and some media, it’s not all media, they they have to make a story out of it so they’re gonna maybe sometimes exaggerate. Of course media companies are owned by people and they’ve got agendas and so on and so forth but that’s what they do. But there is an underlying truth, that in my opinion, that is only an opinion, that data is both wonderful and dangerous. It’s wonderful because if it’s used properly, and correctly, and ethically it can be used for great things right. For example we talked about healthcare, you can really use data to make the world a healthier place if you so choose. You can also use data for manipulating elections, which is a dangerous thing. It’s human beings that do this, it’s not the data itself. Coming back to marketing, it’s the same thing. We talked about good marketing and bad marketing – marketing per se, digital marketing is not a good or bad thing it’s human beings that make it so. You can get the scammers trying to flog you nonsensical, become a millionaire in three months rubbish on the pre-rolls on YouTube or you get people launching stuff in purely ethical ways and making markets aware of fantastic new products and doing it in a good way. Okay we can’t talk about politics too much because I absolutely will disagree with you and then we’ll be having a fight we didn’t want to have.

What did I want to say about Brexit, it’s kind of overblown. I think the actual threat here’s, what I actually think is, if you’re one of the seven billion people who’s walking around the planet and they’re collecting loads of data about you, you’ve got nothing to be concerned about unless you piss off the very top people at Google or Facebook. You don’t want to annoy those people and have them go to your file and say okay what do we know about Jeremy Spiller?

Jeremy: I think that you’re right, but the other danger is that it gets hacked, it gets stolen. What can they do with it? They’ve still got seven billion data points or seven billion data subjects. The point is that recently, over the last few years, there’s been multiple scenarios where businesses have had all their data stolen. You’ve got scenarios recently, telco companies where they found that they’d lost a chunk of their data and someone was   using it to scam their customers. This happens all the time.

Okay, so at that level where people are being sloppy with their security yes there is an issue. There are two things that I’ve  been told that have concerned me over big data use. The first was I met somebody who claimed to be a very high up in the Hong Kong police force and he told me that in 1992 they were able to ascertain the sexual preference of people and their proclivity to commit crimes from people’s fingerprints. There was some pattern in people’s fingerprints that enabled them to decide if this person was likely to be a future other gender, there weren’t other genders back in 1992, but gay or straight or whatever and whether they were likely to commit crimes.

Jeremy: I have to say if someone told me that I would like walk away.

Martin: Okay you’re welcome to walk away I just told you …..

Jeremy: That’s like telling me that how wide your eye are apart determines how much of a criminal you are, just rubbish.

Martin: Yes but this is the level we’re on with the subject of data, how valuable and useful data is. The second instance was I met somebody who was a data scientist for one of these huge corporations or an agency who worked for one of these huge corporations. He was telling me they had got to the point with women’s buying patterns that they could predict when those women were pregnant. It was so effective, the way they got caught out was that marketing ended up turning up in the houses of teenage pregnant girls who didn’t even know they were pregnant. That’s when they said okay, this is too much, we can’t actually do this, this is too invasive. I don’t know if it is invasive, I don’t know what it is but those are my two scary cases of data use.

Jeremy: Well I would doubt, I’m  not doubting what you’re telling me or anything like that, but if somebody told me something like that I’d want to dig into it a bit further, find out how it was being done. I know that Facebook did announce, I can’t remember exactly when maybe it’s to Tech 2010 or 2012 they could predict how relationships were going to go. They did announce that in a public press release that they could actually predict. This, interestingly, does touch on another very fascinating area of digital marketing which is sorry about that it’s not my speciality, which is which is predictive analytics. Now that’s a thing, it’s a real thing. Predictive analytics are very powerful, but in order to deploy them you’ve got to have the right things in place to be able to use it in the first place. If you’re a smaller business you’re not going to have that.

Martin: We come back to that because the thing about that documentary with the Cambridge Analytica thing that got me was effectively all they did was identify the floating voters and then start landing messages on them that might convince them to vote one way or another. That’s all electioneering has ever been. They might have done it using this technology, using this data, but that’s all any any campaigner, political campaigner in the history of the world has ever done. Try and identify who might vote for them, who there’s a chance they can get to vote for them, and influence them to do that. I don’t really know how I feel about it, but you’re right, this is all happening at a very different level from the person who is a small business who might have just opened a shop, or an online something, or a restaurant – so what is your recommendation to those people? If I am a small business, we accept that you should probably look digital first, it’s certainly the most cost effective, most transparent, you get the most data, you probably get the most effect, so it’s going to be digital marketing or what should they do?

Jeremy: You asked Ed the same question and so I was actually thinking about this because I I saw the previous video. I actually think the first thing, there’s two or three things a small business, and when I say small business by the way I think the definition of a small business is anything up to £100 million so it’s it’s not that small; so small to medium sized SMB is up to £100 million so there’s a sort of – we’re not a huge enterprise but we are big enough. There’s also those types of businesses and of course startups and post startups, growing businesses, of course it depends where you are in that growth. If I were to give a few tips, for want of a better word, seeing literally hundreds of startups succeed and fail and I teach on entrepreneurship and innovation course at Edic so I see every year, fantastic young people with amazing ideas, huge talent and knowledge, and know-how – I think there are things that anybody who wants to grow their business, if they haven’t done them, then they should do them. The first, and this is one thing that people often get wrong is to measure from the beginning. What people most often do is want to do all this stuff and then measure it with Google analytics or Facebook Insights then we’ll measure it. I think one should set up robust measurement right from the get go, right from the moment they have a website they should have Google Analytics and Google search console set up. They should know quite quickly, within a month or so they can check their ranks for Google rankings I’m  talking about SERPS, what position they have in Google so on and so forth. So they know where they are right. But there’s actually other things that they should do before that which is to is to do research into the marketplace, into their customers, whether people are going to buy, if it’s a startup whether people are going to buy their products and services. It’s all those key things, they should set stuff up properly, it’s part of the overall business plan which presumably they’ve written or created anyway and done their profit and loss forecasting. They should they should really get those foundation things in place. That comes back to what you were saying earlier about marketing and digital marketing, those things, that whatever you do, you need to do at the beginning to understand your customer, you need to set up measurement, you need to be very clear about what it is about your product or service that people are going to buy and this comes to branding. I think people, if you’re starting a business, or if you’re growing a business, you’ll need to be very clear about your brand, and the differentiators, and the competitors and all those sorts of things. If you don’t do that and you just go off and do some SEO, and go off and do some Facebook advertising you’re gonna waste money, and businesses can’t afford to waste money, especially now. You need to do all that basic groundwork. Then, of course    we’re talking about touch points, and websites and and all the things like that we touched on before. Checking that your landing pages work, they can do all this basic stuff because when you’ve got all that right it’s going to be so much easier to be successful than just throwing yourself at stuff without getting the groundwork right.

Martin: I would agree with you and as much as I might have challenged where digital marketing has got to in this conversation I have very real, very recent experience of a small business, nothing like 100 million, not necessarily anything like a million, still managing to eke out some space for themselves, and some really quite considerable success for themselves. I think in this swamp the worst marketing, if you’re starting out in marketing then you really are in the swamp immediately pitching against this guy who is telling people that they can make $240 000 a year and they don’t even need to know what they’re doing.      That really is the quagmire. For a business with a good project, with a good product, with good values and interests, I absolutely think there’s space for them to be doing digital marketing well and to be achieving through digital marketing. I think marketing is probably the worst market to do that in but in other markets digital marketing is a really good option. I have huge respect for people who do that from the start.  They say right, I am going to set a business up, whoever that is or wherever that is, if someone says right I want to do this. Interestingly one, of the things I talk about with students is what is the purpose of your business? People have vision, and objectives, and goals, and all that but what is your business going to do? How is it going to make people’s lives better? What’s it actually going to do? Why do you what do you want it to exist? If you can tick those sort of boxes with something genuine and, as you say, valuable –  great, fantastic. That’s really, I think, where  you and I, and people like us – that’s where we like to work, one of those places we like to work. It’s nice getting the gigs with the bigger companies but it’s also huge fun helping people grow their businesses from from very little.

Martin: I think you’re much more excited about working with corporations than I am I don’t particularly enjoy working with corporations at all. It’s nice because they’ve got their objectives, they’ve got their budget, they know what’s supposed to happen and it’s easy to sustain those customers. For me it’s much more exciting working with somebody if they are actually improving the world, that’s what is most exciting for me, of there is real value in their product.

Jeremy: To be fair, in the of times I  work, and have worked with, and continue to work with larger enterprise it tends to be for a part of that enterprise. There are some great people in those spaces, I’m working with some at the moment, really nice people, very switched on. I don’t like to generalise, I don’t like to say if you work for a large businesses they’re all corporates and they wear suits because that’s simply just not true. In the same way that you say every entrepreneur is exciting, new, and passionate because that’s not true either.    It does come down to mindsets and values and those sorts of things. I don’t mind.    Obviously I’m  quite happy to work with people  who tick those boxes so to speak, and love doing so, I have done for decades and hope to continue to do so again. Because a lot of, as mentioned before, a lot of what you and I do now is the teaching and mentoring side, helping people out and I just like to bring to bear the experience I have of working on lots of campaigns, in the real world. That teaching and training is great because I think that that’s where you can actually see things really happen, when the campaign’s actually up and running. I always say to people that if they talk with, you’ve mentioned SEO, and you as    we used to do tons of that stuff and still do some but with SEO when you target some keywords and key phrases and then you get them to the top, wow I mean that’s just such a good feeling. You say yay, look at that, we’re number one position, on multiple devices and stuff and the business starts coming in there’s a huge sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Martin: There is yeah, so we’re the good marketing people, I’m  happy with that. So to round this off, where do you see digital marketing going in the next five to ten years?

Jeremy: Obviously we’ve had a huge shift now with this whole global situation that we’ve got going on and it’s like, so how do you see that shift affecting things? Everything is going much more digital, digital meetings, digital media, digital apps for tracking and tracing and so where …. ?

Jeremy: I like to read the work and watch the work of   people like Gerd Leonard *** who who’s a futurist, and others like him and there was an interesting interview of him the other day I think on LinkedIn. He said there’s some things that you sort of know are going to happen, so that’s AI and machine learning are going to get bigger, that we’re going to see driverless cars, that we’re going to see much more growth in the internet of things, that data is going to be used more to give people better customer experiences, that a lot of businesses are moving much more towards customer centricity – these things are all    pretty obvious and that’s what’s gonna shape stuff moving for over the next five or ten years. You mentioned that there hadn’t been lots of leaps, I think there has been at times it’s not as if it is accelerating and it is increasing but there are jumps. I think that COVID has caused a sudden jump, because I’ve  been saying for years, I mean years, I’ve been saying to people why do people, pre-COVID why do so many people put up with sitting in traffic jams every morning and every evening going to and from work? Why do people spend a fortune, why do companies spend a fortune, on offices? Why is there so much wastage? Why is this happening? I’ve  been saying that for years now what’s happened with COVID, for all the worst reasons, in many ways, has forced businesses to actually look at what they’re doing and say can this now be done by people working from home? The answer in a lot of cases is yes. I was talking to a guy recently who works for a very large Telco company. They’ve just had a survey sent round to all the employees saying you’re working at home now would you like to carry on working at home? Without a doubt, I think we’re going to see much more virtuality, is that the right word? You’re right lots of people are going to be doing a lot more online right across the board. It’s not going to stay as it is because obviously once there are vaccines then the world will change yet again. I do not think it’ll go back to how it was, I think businesses will now say do we need all those offices that actually we just used to put people in little booths, they could be working from home now. The flip side of that, interestingly, is that what’s happening is people, because a lot of people are staying at home much more now, there’s a there’s going to be a mindset required to keeping those people mentally sound, because there has been a rise in mental illness. Because people can’t can’t get out so much, they’re not meeting people so much, so there’s a lot of that going on as well. So being able to support people properly when they’re actually working out of the office most of the time is a challenge that will need to be met. A lot of businesses have been hot desking for years. I know Microsoft for example, I used to go to the offices in Amsterdam, that’s a whole office full of hot desks and people coming and going.  Working like that is just going to be a much bigger thing now. A lot of that will be led by the fact that everything’s going to go more digital and the world is going to be different. I hope that answers the question. That’s going to happen right across multiple areas of our culture. Questions are now being asked about whether people should be sitting in traffic jams. Of course there’s an ecological benefit as well, to stop the traffic jams and that’s another thing that’s that’s trending more and more. The environment has been put on the back burner because of COVID, global warming and all that. Businesses are now going to have to be more and more responsible, they’re going to have to be more responsible with their data, but they’re also going to have to be more and more responsive about their carbon footprint. That’s going to become even bigger than it is now because we’re facing such problems with global warming, small businesses.

Martin: I suppose we won’t know if you’ve answered the question until this future unfolds and then we’ll be able to say yes Jem the sage was absolutely right about these things.

Jeremy: I’m  reading other people’s literature, I’m listening to other people who dig into the data in a much more robust way.

Martin: Have you read Homo Deus?

Jeremy: I haven’t really got beyond the first five pages.

Martin: One of the best books I’ve ever read.

Jeremy: Yeah sapiens was a great book, really good book   

Martin: And Homo Deus is a good one, it’s the third one I’m  struggling with. Jem I knew this was going to be brilliant.

Jeremy: Oh thank you it’s been brilliant for me as well.

Martin: I thought if Jem turns up with his hair we are in great shape to start with 🙂

Jeremy: Are we at the end? So quick? My word.

Martin: Yes, we’ve done an hour and 15 minutes, I think it’s enough 🙂

Jeremy: Okay, well I hope people enjoy watching it as well I hope they do as well I’m  not sure what value they’ll take I think it’s interesting because it is an evolution and so on.

Martin: People need to understand from people like you who’ve been in the trenches, twice as long as I’ve  been in the trenches, and me who’s been in the trenches long enough that this is an evolution. If you are getting into digital marketing I don’t think people need to be scared, they need to be wary about where they invest their time and energy in terms of engaging people but I think to guard against that is just learning something about it before you start. Read a book or two, or something but understand that seriously, the way I define marketing is it’s the investment you make in finding winning and keeping customers and that actually is the whole of business. So sales and marketing isn’t something that you could just throw on somebody, it’s something that you have to take responsibility for. Like I said to Ed, you have to fix that riddle in your business; how do I find, win, and keep customers profitably? Once you’ve found the answer to that riddle, then it’s essentially a mechanical process, you just keep doing that process. Until you’ve done that I don’t think that marketing is something that you can just outsource to somebody. My advice would be, if you are going to outsource your marketing to somebody, at least speak speak to more than one person about it. See if you can find somebody who’s got an overall view and some overall experience of how all of these things work. If you’re talking to a Facebook Ad specialist they’re going to recommend Facebook Ads, if you’re talking to a social media agency they’re gonna recommend social media. Really you need a holistic approach to marketing. The question is; Where are your market? How do you engage with them and convert them?

Jeremy: I would also encourage people to to pick up on some of the topics we’ve discussed today go and read more about them, never stop learning and also wherever you choose to post this join the conversation, put some comments in, let’s let’s keep the conversation going because I think it’s it’s important to do that. It’s important to keep talking about these things to help and support each other as well.

Martin: Absolutely yeah and this is part of the value of the the training that you and I have both delivered. I say this to people in case they don’t realise, I ask people why they’re there and about 30% of the time people will say because I’ve  got no idea what my marketing agency are talking about and I need to know what they’re talking about. So that’s a big reason but the big value of that is having kind of an overall understanding. That’s what the the Digital Marketing Institute is really good, it’s five days 30 hours and 10 sessions. The first one’s an overview, the last one’s an overview, and then you kind of delve in on eight digital marketing topics. The other thing that they get from that that’s really valuable is they get to be part of a network, because like you said at the beginning and I’m  the only idiot I know who does it but someone at Google or Facebook decides they want to change the user interface on one of their pages and it’s changed globally, and there’s no recourse. When I was training, I don’t know weekly, I would very often sit down with my laptop in front of the people with the page open and say no I’m  sorry it didn’t look like this yesterday. You can’t teach digital marketing it’s about a bit like learning to surf so I always tell them that I’m  here to make sure you’re safe in the water and now go get smashed up and see what happens. It’s good to do digital marketing you’re not gonna break the internet    it’s it’s fine like it might cost you a bit of you might get a bit bruised in the process but    it’s still gonna carry on working and it is gonna be fine jen this has been such a pleasure thank you so much great man thank you really enjoyed it eight or nine other people on my list so it might be four or five months before I come back to you we’ll do a part two okay we’ll take any time did jim’s predictions of the future come true we’ll do that you might have to wait a touch longer but yeah that’ll be fun anytime martin is an absolute pleasure thank you very much for inviting me take care you’ve got five and a half months man for your predictions to come through speak to you again soon thanks so much okay see ya see ya bye bye

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